Tcl/Tk, also known as Wish, is a powerful
computer language which was popular on early
Unix systems, especially in commercial and scientific fields. The latest version
- Wish 8.5 - has brought long overdue improvements in aliased fonts,
vastly improving the ascetics of Tk applications.

It's first part is Tcl - an elegant scripting language whose only data
structure is a string(!), and uses lists extensively. This allows for very
readable and deeply nested code. It is also reminiscent of functional
computer languages (as opposed to procedural languages like C and Bourne
Shell) and, as such, can be hard for beginners to understand.

Tk is the powerful graphics library that the user sees on the computer screen.
Versions prior to 8.5 had a slightly unpolished look and feel - which may be the
reason it never gained more popularity. Tk allows for very rapid and correct
application development. A simple Tcl/Tk application takes one line:

Building from source is fairly easy,
with parallel installation of different versions no problem.
For example, if "wish8.4" is in "/usr/bin", you can install wish8.5 in
"/usr/local/bin". After downloading and uncompressing the tcl-8.5.2 and tk-8.5.2 source code:

Based on a tessellation puzzle named Beat the Computer, this is my first "original" Tk program.
Over the last couple of years, I've implemented most of the different puzzles.
Download. Version 1.8.2 has attractive Help, Changelog and About widgets, and a minor hack which should finally fix Wish8.5's precision issue.

M.A.M.E. stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, and
is an amazing project that brings the arcade classics to
your PC. There are many, many versions and front-ends for this fairly chaotic project.

Mamex is a minimalist front-end written for the Linux
M.A.M.E. port,
XMame
(versions 0.96 and 0.106). I've written many new widgets -
overhauling functionality and appearance, and also hacked a
useful "Mute" option into the game. You'll find more info
in
Mamex-1.4.1.

Linux midi support is such a mess. I've given the Tk interface an overhaul
- see the readme in the tarball for details - fixing as few little bugs
and giving the widget a QA overhaul. Hopefully someone will find this useful.

Mike Griffiths coded this great Hearts
clone. My latest version is
0.90
which includes a few changes.

I had a look at resizing this game, but doing so breaks up the nice clean
look of the face-up cards in the player's hand... Instead i have added an
auto-raise feature. It helps a little, and looks cool too.

This thoughtful game of solitaire is played with the equivalent of two packs of
cards. I recently removed the poor quality sound support till
Snack
is working better. On the plus side , at
http://www.fotosearch.com
i found some great art work and made a few nice card-backs. (One of which is
also in TkTk and Hearts). Download

Bao Trinh
originally coded tksol for FreeBSD, and it hadn't been updated in 8 or
9 years. Over several point releases I've fixed quite
a few bugs, added some features and really got my hands dirty learning Tcl.
Recently some new artwork has been contributed, and the game is looking nice.
Download

This is another program I found at
tcl.tk which was mostly complete but
had playability issues. I've made a few changes, including the
addition of high-score and help widgets, and redesigning the buttons and
menus. Thanks to the original author,
Kevin Kenny.Download.

Note - unfortunately snack doesn't work too well anymore. With OSS it is poor,
and even worse with ALSA. It really needs someone to give this worthwhile
project an update.

Awele is an interesting game from Africa.
This version is written in Tcl/Tk and C and is an attractive though challenging game.
While it is redistributable, it is not GPL-ed, so it requires a clumsy
installation... See the download for details.

Stéphane Arnold brought this game to my attention, and has his own version at
his
webpage.

Tickletux Hangman
works fine, but has been abandoned for a few years. It has some GUI and playability issues, but shows real class.

There is also an impressive solitaire known as
Patience
It is written in [incr]tcl and includes 5 or 6 different games
including "Battle Solitaire". To get it running , after installing Itcl, I had
to edit patience.tcl and replace